As Media Fawns Over Jimmy Carter’s Legacy, We Can See Their Rehabilitation Plans for Biden’s Failed Presidency

After former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, hagiographies quickly appeared. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, especially if they’re Democrat, so this was to be expected.

However, what was truly astonishing in their tone was that Carter’s disastrous four-year term in the White House, from 1977 to 1981, included a bunch of stuff that just kinda, you know, happened to him. It wasn’t his fault, seriously!

He couldn’t do anything about inflation. He couldn’t have foreseen the Iranian hostage crisis or gas lines or “malaise” — which he never said in that speech, everyone was quick to remind you. He came into office after Watergate and Vietnam. It was bad timing — nothing to do with Jimmy, of course.

The man from Plains, Georgia did what he could. And when he lost, he had a spectacular post-presidency where he played the role of senior statesman. Period. Don’t question it. Move along, people.

Again, talking trash about 100-year-old former presidents as their body still lies warm is generally poor form, even if these fawning extra-obituary pieces were, at best, looking through rose-tinted glasses wrapped with rose-tinted cling-wrap with rose-tinted contact lenses on, so one was inclined to let it slide. But, come Monday, the day after Carter died, you could almost see the gears in motion at the West’s major establishment media outlets:

“Say, you know what old guy who only served a single term also had stuff just happen to him — totally not his fault, just stuff that occurred — after two jarring events in the national consciousness? And you know how he can redeem himself post-White House? I’ll give you a hint: First name Joe. OK, need more? Second name starts with a B. Still having issues?”

To be fair, the outgoing president didn’t exactly discourage this, using his speech honoring Carter’s legacy to implicitly go after the president-elect, saying that he lacked “decency,” which Carter had.

“Decency, decency, decency,” Biden said when asked what Trump could learn from Carter.

“Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking by someone who needed something and just keep walking?” Biden said. “Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk? I can’t.”

He went on to say that “the rest of the world looks to us. And he was worth looking to.”

But look at the headlines from around the world after that remark. U.K. Guardian: “Biden says Trump could learn ‘decency’ from Jimmy Carter in tribute address.” Agence France Presse: “Carter, in death, becomes symbol of lost political ‘decency’ in US.” The Daily Beast: “‘Decency, Decency, Decency.’ Biden Uses Jimmy Carter’s Death to Go After Trump.”

And didja know the comparisons didn’t stop there? Hmm? Didja? Because every mainstream liberalish press outlet in the whole wide English-speaking world — and I’m assuming those that aren’t, although I’m not going wade through Google Translate articles to see what the laptop warrior class in the Tamil media sphere are saying about the Biden-Carter connection — made sure to underscore the point that both men were American presidents who history just happened to, and who voters punished for stuff imposed upon them from without.

That fiendish history, it’ll just sneak up on you where you’re least expecting it to! Like, um, in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where history is generally made by the person who is nominally the most powerful man in the free world.

The BBC, for example:

Four decades seems like a long time – a record for a former US president – yet many of the challenges facing America in 2024 are not that different from the ones Carter faced, and at times succumbed to, in the late 1970s.

The US during the Carter years faced a crisis of confidence. Americans were grappling with economic turmoil at home and a range of challenges to US power abroad. Fast forward four decades, and the players and issues are strikingly familiar – the economy and the environment, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Years have passed, the leaders have changed, but the challenges linger.

… The inability to shape global events even from the world’s most powerful office continues to haunt US leaders. Current President Joe Biden’s dose of this cold reality first came during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which lowered the curtain on two decades of futile American nation-building and saw the Taliban sweep back into power.

 … Both Carter and Biden, humbled by seemingly outmatched regional forces in Iran and Afghanistan, were also confronted by the territorial ambitions of global powers. Carter was lambasted for inadequately responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then widely denounced for the move he did make – ordering a boycott by US athletes of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Note the tone. What could either man possibly have done to avert these things? Stuff just happens to Democrats, and then Republicans do stuff that the media says Democrats are responsible for cleaning up. (A common theme in these stories: GOP presidents do stuff. Democrat presidents have stuff happen to them.)

And it’s not just the British taking this tack, either. I give you the first four paragraphs of The New York Times’ Biden-Carter love-fest, written by chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and given the title, “‘Hanging Out With Jimmy Carter,’ Biden Faces the Echoes of History”:

When President Biden appeared on camera to pay tribute to former President Jimmy Carter, he sounded almost as if he were thinking of himself in these final days in office.

“In today’s world, some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man of a bygone era — with honesty and character, faith and humility,” Mr. Biden said in breaking away from his Caribbean vacation on Sunday after the former president’s death. “It mattered. But I don’t believe it’s a bygone era.”

Mr. Biden, too, has been dismissed as a man of a bygone era, an old-school politician in a new-school world, an octogenarian president playing by rules he learned in the 1970s when he served in the Senate and Mr. Carter was in the White House, rules that did not help him in today’s fast-paced, smash-mouth political arena. He is, in this view, a man out of time — Mr. Carter’s time.

 As he said, Mr. Biden does not accept that and believes that “the fundamental human values” his generation brought to the table still apply. Yet when he spoke of Mr. Carter’s “honesty and character,” he left no doubt that he meant that in contrast to his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, Donald J. Trump, the first former president ever convicted of felony crimes and found liable for sexual abuse and business fraud.

The rest of the article continues in that tone, but note that last part: Thanks to a barrage of lawfare during the 2024 election, the “decent” Joe Biden — speaking of himself when he called Carter “decent” — tried to have his chief opposition branded as a criminal, always at the hands of prosecutors who were either appointed by Biden’s Department of Justice or ambitious members within Biden’s party.

And, of course, he and the rest of his retinue called Trump and extremist and racist — just like Jimmy Carter did with Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. (Lawfare wasn’t a thing yet, because nobody would have thought of charging the opposition with a silly charge of improper accounting when he signed a non-disclosure agreement with a chatty adult film actress, but one digresses.)

The rest of the piece, of course, deals with how Biden will navigate his post-presidency, which is kind of laughable when you consider that the reason he didn’t seek another term is that he barely knows he’s still president.

To be fair, this might make him able to better fade into the background, which is good; Carter was celebrated as a sort of contract diplomat, but he was a man who loved dictators and loathed the Jewish state of Israel (and perhaps even Jews themselves, full stop).

He did less than nothing to advance the cause of world peace, for which he was given a Nobel Peace Prize — the surest sign of geopolitical moral turpitude in modern existence. History, one hopes, will be less kind to Carter’s post-presidential Southern hospitality to tin-pots like Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and Kim Il-sung than the Nobel committee was.

Not that this makes Biden’s “Weekend at Bernie’s” term in office any better, either. Stuff seemed to happen to Biden in exactly the same places, but for entirely different reasons; we now know thanks to a pre-Christmas Wall Street Journal report that as early as the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster, the president was disengaged about the reality of the situation and not talking to Congress regarding the collapse of the coalition government to Taliban forces.

In truth, thanks to the COVID-19 campaign insulating him from any real scrutiny, he was probably never fully engaged or in compos mentis during the run-up to his presidency, much less the presidency itself. That’s why inflation, Afghanistan, and Middle Eastern crises were imposed upon him: Not because of the impotency of Carter, but because his presidency was run by a small bubble that insulated him from the problems they caused.

But again, note that the long game of history has little to do with the contemporaneous media narrative. For the moment, Jimmy Carter was a great man who just had, you know, a lot of stuff occur to him while he was on his watch. And Joe Biden can do the same rehabilitation to his reputation in the years to come! Forget about the fact that the outgoing president literally can’t remember who’s living and who’s dead, he’ll be an envoy to solve the civil war in Narnia or whatever. It’ll happen, just you watch.

Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter do have something in common, something the media isn’t going to say right now because it’s impolitic: Both were bad presidents and also not great people, at least as public figures.

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